I said nothing. But I understood. He was going behind Ramzen’s back.
When he was gone, I tore open the envelope. Inside was a small plastic sandwich bag, and inside that was a tiny severed toe.
With ugly purple paint on the nail.
I called in a waitress and a bartender, and I made them do most of the labor while I sat in my office. I let them each go an hour early, and then I told the few remaining customers that I needed to close early.
When Zakir came in with Theresa, I was sitting at the table she and I had used the day before, first to share a joint, then to talk to the cop.
Theresa was limping. She had on black Nike running shoes, and it looked like the toe area on one foot was wet.
Zakir shoved her roughly into a chair and sat down across from me.
His bourbon was already poured, sitting next to the bag of white powder.
“It looks like you opened it,” Zakir said as he took his seat.
I nodded.
“And?”
“It gave me a bloody nose,” I said. “It burned like a son of a bitch. But it was the best high I’ve ever had.”
No need to lie about that.
He grinned widely. He picked up his bourbon and twirled it around, spiraling the ice cubes, which had started to melt while I waited.
“You didn’t think of poisoning me, did you?”
“I thought about it,” I said.
He laughed. Then he threw back the glass and slurped out the bourbon. Like before, he pulled out the switchblade and dug around in the glass. He fished out a piece of ice and crunched it in his teeth.
He left the switchblade sticking out of the glass, the tip bleeding into the puddle of bourbon at the bottom.
“So what happens now?” I said.
“What do you mean?” he said. “You get the girl. I get the Y.”
“I mean with you and Ramzen. You trying to take over? Coup d’état?”
“Just a little side business,” Zakir said. “You can keep your mouth shut, no?”
“Yes,” I said.
“And you?” He looked at Theresa, his eyebrows arched.
“She can,” I said.
“Good.”
He grabbed the bag of powder and headed for the door.
“What do all these Chinese letters mean?” he said.
“I think it’s supposed to be the name of the dinosaur whose bones are all busted up in there,” I said.
He gave me a hard stare, and I wondered if he could see my pounding heart shaking my chest from where he was. His eyes drifted over to Theresa.
“You coming?” he said.
She looked at me, and in a second her demeanor changed from fear to a look of guilty pleasure. She gave me a smile that was part apology, part delight.
She stood and kissed me on the cheek.
“I did have fun,” she whispered, and walked toward Zakir with no limp.
Zakir was grinning, his mouth full of white teeth, so pleased with himself that he couldn’t contain his elation.
I glowered at Theresa. “You should have just taken it from me this morning after you fucked me.”
She shrugged. “I was going to check to see if you had it with you. But you wouldn’t fall asleep.”
She turned to go and I didn’t know what to say, so I blurted, “Your brother loved you.”
She huffed and said, “My brother loved his stupid guitars.”
They left and I sat alone in the bar for a long time. Then I collected the switchblade and my backpack and walked home. On the way I took a detour down to the lake’s edge and tossed the baggie with the toe—whoever it belonged to—into the gray water.
I locked the door and spent the day with the switchblade in my hand, nodding in and out of sleep.
When evening came and no one had broken down my door, I went over to Theresa’s apartment. The door was unlocked. She and Zakir were both there, Zakir doubled over on the futon, Theresa lying on the floor. The bodies were contorted, frozen in positions of agony. Their noses had hemorrhaged a pink foamy blood. Their eyes were bloodshot and bulging from their sockets, their faces locked in a rictus of pain. Theresa had bitten her tongue between her clenched teeth.
I had hoped that Zakir would go first and that Theresa would be smarter than the rats. But they must have done their lines together.
I took off Theresa’s shoes just to be sure. She had all ten toes.
There was a framed photograph on the counter of Fender and Theresa. They were a few years younger, both smiling enthusiastically. I wondered if they were actually happy or just acting. I’d never really known Theresa at all.
“See you,” I said to their smiling faces, my voice a hoarse, haunted whisper that I didn’t recognize. “Wouldn’t want to be you.”
I called Detective Williams and spent the rest of the night at the police station answering questions.
“Turns out this drug called Y is nothing more than Chinese rat poison,” he said.
He looked at me skeptically, wondering what I knew and wasn’t telling him, but he seemed to be satisfied that the case was closed. He never searched my backpack.
I walked toward home, a zombie, in the early morning hours. I had hardly slept in three days. I’d lost my oldest friend and a girl I loved, even if only briefly, even if she never really existed. A fog rolled in and I stood at the edge of the lake, looking out into the smoky gray air, imagining a world on the other side with dinosaurs running around with eternity pulsing through their veins.
I called Ramzen.
“Zakir tried to blackmail me for the Y,” I said. “He was going behind your back.”
“You had the Y?”
“I gave him rat poison,” I said. “He’s dead.”
Ramzen was quiet for a long moment, then he said, “Someone else will be making the collection next week.”
“I figured.”
“And what of the Y?” he asked. “Where is it?”
I knew the Y would buy my freedom. I had been looking for a way out for years, and this was it.
“I don’t know,” I said, and hung up.
In my apartment, I pulled out the bag of Y, opened it, breathed in its primordial scent.
I wanted to escape.
To disappear.
To go back in time to a prehistoric world where Fender hadn’t died yet and Theresa hadn’t revealed her true self.
I poked the knife, sticky with dried blood, into the Y and came out with a heap of bone dust on the blade. I lowered my nose to the tip and inhaled as quickly and deeply as I could.
T. C. Boyle
THE DESIGNEE
from The Iowa Review
What he couldn’t have imagined, even in his bleakest assessments of the future, was the boredom. He’d sat there in the hospital while Jan lay dying, holding her hand after each of the increasingly desperate procedures that had left her bald and emaciated and looking like no one he’d ever known, thinking only of the bagel with cream cheese he’d have for dinner and the identical one he’d have for breakfast in the morning. If he allowed himself to think beyond that, it was only of the empty space in the bed beside him and of the practical concerns that kept everything else at bay: the estate, the funeral, the cemetery, the first shovel of dirt ringing on the lid of the coffin, closure. There was his daughter, but she had no more experience of this kind of free fall than he, and she had her own life and her own problems all the way across the country in New York, which was where she retreated after the funeral. A grief counselor came to the house and murmured in his direction for an hour or two, people sent him cards, books, and newspaper clippings in a great rolling wave that broke over him and as quickly receded, but nobody addressed the boredom.